In today's vehicle market, there exist a variety of body shapes, sizes and styles to meet the demands of consumers. Traditionally, manufacturing facilities have been limited in the types of vehicle that they may manufacture because of different vehicle footprints and part number differences between vehicles. For example, compact cars and luxury cars have different body panel sizes and in some cases a different number of body panels. The tooling systems used in traditional manufacturing facilities have typically been mechanically and electrically fixed to produce one body configuration or style. To change to a different body configuration or style, these traditional tooling systems must be mechanically reconfigured and reprogrammed, creating delays and long startup times for vehicle body style changeovers. There is increasing pressure to reduce lead times and provide for increased flexibility in manufacturing facilities such that multiple vehicle body styles may be produced in generally the same period of time or quickly changed over.
Tooling systems typically include mechanical and electrical actuators coupled to tooling devices. The mechanical and electrical actuators may include electric motors, screws, gearboxes and/or slides. There will always be a slight build variance between electrical and mechanical actuators of the same type. For example, the run-out for electric motor shafts, the backlash in gear boxes, and the pitch in screws will slightly vary between actuators of the same type. These slight variances will be amplified by the assembly of multiple mechanical and electrical actuators into one robot or positioning tool such as a multi-axis positioner used in the assembly of vehicles. Accordingly, upon replacing a faulty positioning tool, the new positioning tool must be shimmed, rotated, adjusted and/or reprogrammed to exhibit the same dynamic and static characteristics of the previous faulty positioning tool. This is a time-consuming process that may cause delays in production for a manufacturing facility.